iPhone App Directory

I was really pleased to see this update from miniMusic today as their site has been very quiet for a while now. According to the news page, Pianofly is now due in November. Here's what the Pianofly page says:

Unfortunately, we had a serious family medical emergency and had to essentially shut down development for all of September. We are now back to work and have found a solution to our design issues (more about that below) and are working toward a final version of the software. The first version might be released without recording capabilities (to be added in a later upgrade) since that is the area that still needs the most work. Unexpected problems could still arise, so we cannot yet give a final release date, although Apple's recent changes to the NDA and introduction of developer forums will help immensely with such problems. Although the iPhone offers a rich platform with exciting possibilities, development continues to take longer than we expect. Since we have thousands of paying customers waiting for the 1.3 upgrade for our non-music product, No.2, we will be pushing that out before the first Pianofly release.

If you look at a screenshot of our SoundPad application for Palm, the interface is basically divided into three parts: the piano keyboard (bottom), the oscillators (middle), and the envelopes (top). Our initial approach was to make these three separate screens in Pianofly, so when editing an envelope, for example, the envelope interface would zoom to fill the screen so that you could make accurate adjustments with your fingertip. A fingertip just doesn't offer the accuracy needed to interact with all three portions on screen at the same time. However, in testing we found that it was annoying to have to switch back and forth to test sounds with the piano keyboard. We can fit a good, usable keyboard in half the screen, so our new design has reduced the oscillator and envelope areas to also also be usable in half the iPhone screen, so the piano is always accessible while working on either part of a sound.

SoundPad also has a whole 2nd screen for editing the sound bank (choosing sounds, adding new sounds, etc.). For use in musical performances, we wanted this to also have access to the keyboard so you could quickly select a sound and play it immediately. This is now a third display that can accompany the piano keyboard in Pianofly. You can select a sound and play it, edit the oscillators while playing, or edit the envelope for each oscillator while playing.

Thanks to everyone for your interest in our iPhone products and your patience; we'll try to make it worth the wait! Alongside Pianofly we are also working on music notation software for iPhone and a version of BugBand, our sight reading game. We hope to release one of those in December.

We will post further updates here, but will probably hold off on screen shots until just before the actual product launch.

I'm looking forward to seeing the new miniMusic app, and the ones that are to follow.

M-Audio has posted new firmware for their Micro-track II recorder. Here's what their site says:

M-Audio is pleased to announce the availability of MicroTrack II firmware version 1.0.7. This full-release update offers enhanced accuracy of broadcast WAV marker placement and improved performance when using CompactFlash cards larger than 8GB. The update is available immediately for Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X 10.3.9-10.5.5.

Some of you may know that HotPaw is a basic language for Palm OS. HotPaw have created an app for the iPhone. I think that's interesting, and my hope is that HotPaw will produce a language for the iPhone too.

More news from Noise IO Synth. The app (when it is finally released) will have a velocity sensitive keyboard (of sorts). Here's what Noise IO says:

We're happy to inform noise addicts that the release version of Noise.io will feature a velocity-responsive keyboard.That's possible because of our unique technology: the higher you hit the keyboard note - the lower the velocity will be. So, you should aim lower for more volume.

Meanwhile left part of the screen is used as an assignable 3-dimensional modulation wheel (yes you can do multitouch there).

All this comes naturally and after a little training, expressive play is possible.

By the way, the betatesters have just got the pre-release final beta and soon will hopefully post their first impressions in the forum :-)

I beg to differ. Java is perfectly capable of handling all aspects of digital music production. Because it runs in a virtual machine, load times can be increased as the virtual machine is loaded, but actual application performance is no different than C or any other byte compiled language. If all the other applications for Android are written in Java, then the virtual machine will already be resident in memory and load times will be indistinguishable from any other language.

I'm certain processor specific modifications will be required, but it will not be an insurmountable challenge to modify JSyn, or develop a new real-time audio synthesis API for Android. All manner of other music applications already exist in Java form.

Google is right to embrace Java. Plus Android is built on linux, so there's no reason C code won't execute on it, just as there's no reason for there to not be a JavaVM for the iPhone, but Apple is blocking Sun from implementing it.

I don't know much about Java to be honest, but this does sound interesting. I shall have to look into it in more depth. In the past I've tried mobile processing, but haven't done anything with it for a while.

I know there's been a lot of talk about a Sun Microsystems JVM for iPhone, but that's gone quiet. Also, the IBM Micro environment for Palm OS is no longer available. As for Windows Mobile, I don't know about a JVM for that platform.

So, if we can access useful JVMs for a platform, then maybe Java could be a useful and simple language for mobile music.

Planet Griff doesn't think too much of Android's ability to cater for mobile music making. This is largely based around the fact that apps for Android are java based which is generally to slow to do anything too creative.

It is a shame really as Android is open source. Perhaps Google will do something with it in the long run. Who knows.

Sonic Vox from Smule has an interesting sound to it. The app works with iPhone or a 2g Touch so I won't be able to try it out. However, from the sounds of it this is the beginnings of a little vocoder.

4Pockets have won an award from SmartPhone and Pocket PC magazine for their RTA Pro application together with getting AudioBox into the finalists. Congratulations to 4Pockets, and I hope we might see not only some updates but also some new apps soon?

Yesterday the iPod was 7 years old. Amazing to think that it is 7 years since this iconic device entered the public domain. It changed a lot of the way we approach music. Not only listening, but also starting to change making music too.

PalmInfocenter has a post on Access announcing ALP3. It is difficult to tell what if any impact something like ALP will end up having, especially as Palm are still supposed to be developing their NOVA OS.

Alleygate is a mono gate. It uses the left & right input channels - one is input signal, one is gate signal. When the gate signal drops below zero the input signal will be entirely muted. In this respect it is has two states: on or off.

Setup should be easy: pan one signal one way, the other another way. Send them both to the plugin. You can adjust which channel is the gate signal alongside dry/wet in the plugin parameters.

This looks like an interesting application, and reminds me a lot of SpinPad from miniMusic. I think that this could be quite interesting depending on how much control you can take over the sounds themselves.

SonicLife is a new controller app which uses OSC. Here is the description:

Description

The application runs a simple cellular automaton on a grid of cells. The cells can be interacted with by touch and triggers of three different colors can be placed on the grid. The automaton can be set to five different rule-sets, from classic Game of Life to simple horizontal or vertical stepping. Triggers are fired by "alive" cells and send their state as OSC messages to a configurable host on the same Wi-Fi network. Cells and triggers can be randomized by shaking the device.

According to Moo Cow Music their Guitarist app is doing well in charts in the US and in the UK.

I do wonder what Moo Cow might come up with next as the stuff they've done to date seems to be doing well, but I'm not sure I can really imagine what their next app might be, if indeed they plan to put one out.

The Intermorphic blog has a new post today about Mixtikl giving a good deal of background and information about how the app has been developed. Well worth a read if (like me) you're really looking forward to seeing this application.

Ok, this is sort of off topic, but I'll explain why I'm posting it and hopefully it will make sense. I've been a fan of Thomas Dolby for a while. Yesterday he posted on his blog that he had turned 50 I couldn't believe it.

Last year I went to see him live at the ICA in London. It was an amazing gig, not only because it was a great live show, but also because it was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik and he celebrated in a typically unique way. The first half of the show was a film with live music and voice overs about public reaction to sputnik's launch. It was performed by Dolby and his friends the Radio Science Orchestra, which featured an amazing theremin player (see picture below).

So here's the first link to mobile music making. Lots of apps these days are theremin type apps or XY based controllers which we wouldn't have if it weren't for the theremin itself. Hearing it live was awesome.

The second link is that Dolby has been involved in a lot of mobile music technology. Reading about him on wikipedia he was involved in the RMF format and CEO of Beatnik that licensed ringtone technology to Nokia!

So, in many ways he's been around in mobile music for some time.

So, Mr Dolby, if you happen to read this then happy birthday. Why not make a track on your next release hand held only!